On 12/20/20 5:06 AM, Per Jessen wrote:
Axel Braun wrote:
Am Samstag, 19. Dezember 2020, 12:23:24 CET schrieb Per Jessen:
Felix Miata wrote:
IMO, having both a support list and a users list has served only to create more unneeded division in an environment where mailing lists are seeing dwindling usage overall. Support doesn't seem to have enough helpers that answers to the vast majority of answerable help requests can be expected.
I second that and I second your suggestion to merge the two lists into 'users'. Remarkably, our language specific lists manage quite well to keep users and support on one list (per language).
I see it the other way round: 'support' serves a clear purpose, while 'user' can be anything, including off-topic gossip.
That more or less goes for every single one of our lists with public participation. Axel, what do you consider the purpose of "users-el" to be?
For the English language users/support lists, they were only split about two years ago, whereas the single 'users' list worked flawlessly some eighteen years prior to that. Also, by looking at the traffic on 'support', there appears to be more user chat than support.
'flawlessly' is a matter of opinion, the board received many many complaints about the list in that time and tried several times to get the list to stay more as a support list but this was obviously rejected by the users of the list as is evident by the continued behavior. The most common complaint is that simple support questions would go off on a "tangent" of stories and semi related information which often resulted in threads ending up at 20-30 posts rather then the 3 it should have been. Many people who wanted to offer support simply got sick of the volume of mails between issues like this and posts that weren't really support questions.
I think the real question to ask - to see if re-merging is warranted - is if the new support list has achieved its declared purpose.
Putting on my "TW users" cap, I get no better support on 'support' than anywhere else.
But as we have openSUSE Users (日本語), openSUSE Users (Español), openSUSE Users (Deutsch) plus a bunch of inactive language specific groups, it would be consistent to call it openSUSE Users (English) and adjust the description to 'Support and Discussion for English speaking openSUSE Users' (or something like that)
Renaming will never achieve anything.
My point was rather than the other language-specific lists do not have an issue with combining users and support, so maybe the English language groups ought to revert to that scheme too.
My opinion here is that the volume on the english list maybe makes it special compared to most of the other language lists. Maybe it would be less confusing if we had a "Support" and "Discussion" list. I believe having a well functioning support list is vital to the project, if we were to merge the lists then we would need moderate the solresulting list reasonably heavily to ensure it staysas a functional support platform that keeps all the people willing to provide support happy. I think there are many people on the users list who would be rather unhappy with that solution however, we fundamentally have 2 different groups of people who want and expect two very different things and i'm not sure how we can resolve that into 1 list but maybe a "Support" and "Discussion" list would be clearer and would help the process. (Feel free to suggest a better name for "Discussion"). -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B